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24HourForums.com > The Top 10 Supported Forums > Aethelred's History Chamber > The worst shipwreck in history |
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Aethelred Pioneer100© Member  Ye Olde Dead King
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The loss of the RMS Titanic is thought of in the popular mind as "the worst shipwreck ever," but this is far from the case. In fact the death toll of the Titanic sinking is modest when compaired to the worst sea disaster. During the First Punic War (there were three Punic Wars fought betwen Rome and Carthage) naval warfare was critical. The Romans lacked naval experience, but with the aid of Sicily were able to catch up to Carthage. However, in 255 BC off the coast of Camarina, Sicily, a Roman fleet of 264 ships was caught in a violent storm. Many of the ships were driven onto rocks and sank, 184 were lost in all. The death toll from this disaster is thought to have been 80,000-100,000. Think about the impact the loss of 100,000 troops in a single day would have had on Rome, or the impact it would have today! However, the Romans went on to win the war in 241 BC.
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Lady Cop Pioneer100© Member  BAH HUMBUG
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The death toll from this disaster is thought to have been 80,000-100,000. that's an astounding number!
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librtyhead Original500© Member 
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The tide must have littered the beaches with bodies and wreckage.
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Lord Marcovan Original500© Member  Robertson Shinnick
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Oh, I thought you were referring to a single shipwreck. Titanic isn't even close to the "worst shipwreck ever". Close to, but not quite as bad as America's worst, maybe. The explosion and burning of the paddle steamer Sultana on the Mississippi in 1865 is America's worst, and I believe it cost around thirty more lives than the Titanic disaster. (1,547 lost on Sultana in comparison to 1,512 on Titanic, according to one source). The Sultana was overloaded with Union soldiers returning home after the Civil War. Many of them were former POWs. Some 2,400 were aboard when the boilers exploded near Memphis. In rather eerily similar circumstances at the end of a terrible war, the German passenger liner Wilhelm Gustloff was torpedoed by a Russian submarine in 1945. Sunk in the frigid Baltic Sea north of Poland during wintertime, its death toll gives it the grim honor of being the worst shipwreck in history. Like the Sultana, it was grossly overloaded with people; in this case, German soldiers, civilians, and refugees fleeing the Russian advance at the end of World War II. The exact number of deaths on the Gustloff will forever be unknown, but is estimated at somewhere between 8,000 and 13,000, with some sources quoting 9,400. Neither the Sultana and Gustloff disasters are widely known today, both having been eclipsed in the media by other events that happened around the same time. (Sultana sank just as the American Civil War was ending, and right after Lincoln's assassination, and the Gustloff sank just as Hitler's Third Reich in Germany was dying, and was at least partly covered up in the subsequent Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and its former Western allies.) If you're talking about mass shipwrecks, there are others that deserve mention, too, like Kublai Khan's attempted Mongol invasion of Japan in the late 13th century, which was thwarted by a massive typhoon that sank something like 200 Mongol ships. The Japanese called their unexpected salvation the "Divine Wind", and their word for it would be used again later, in World War II: kamikaze. Last edited on 06:35 am by Lord Marcovan |
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Saint Forum-Blogger© Pioneer100© Member  Polymath
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Great Post, Marco...I learned a lot!
A^2 + B^2 = C^2 |
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moguitar Guest
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librtyhead wrote: The tide must have littered the beaches with bodies and wreckage.No doubt, and similar to what really wrecked most of the Spanish Armada, faulty navigation, bad weather, and rocks off of NW Ireland.
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24HourForums.com > The Top 10 Supported Forums > Aethelred's History Chamber > The worst shipwreck in history | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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